This seems a bit ambitious to me. I was reading in my Norton Anthology of English Literature in the Middle Ages which told me that

Before Christianity there had been no books.

I always knew I liked that faith. Of course, I took the quote completely out of context, but it still made me chuckle.

I got further in The Count of Monte Cristo and reached the AHA! moment when everything makes sense all of a sudden and

Someone pointed out earlier that C. S. Lewis took "Pevensie" from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill.

Are we sure of this? Pevensey is also a place on the coast of Southern England.

I'm currently reading A Game of Thrones

I've heard good things about these, but I tend to stay away from the really intense and complicated hard-core fantasy stuff. Is it a member of that family of books? I heard they were making a TV show of it.

mara: I actually agree with the Sherlock Holmes journalist. I find most of Holmes' mysteries to be forgettable. I remember one that consisted of hunting a dead turkey all over London. Why do we care? Maybe there was something in the turkey... I can't remember.

@Kate, I'm just about to finishing up The Legend Of Sigurd And Gudrún, and then I'm also going to be reading The Iliad and The Odyssey. I've also heard of The Faerie Queen and have been wanting to read that as well. Please tell us what you think of it once you've finished, I would like to hear how it is before I sit down to read it.

Kate, that's the place Kipling was referring to... perhaps 'took' is too strong a word and 'inspired' would be better?

EDIT: In another episode of "I love my library" I was searching for a book by Diana Wynne Jones. I searched for Year of the Griffin in general keyword and came across a book I read many years ago and still remember... Switching Well by Peni R. Griffin. In the LibraryThing similar books list for Switching Well is To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Out of all the books that have time travel in them... they picked that one. Apparently, the software has also been upgraded to include a thumbnail of the books in the list... which is kind of cool.

has anyone read Gordon Korman's books? some of my favorites are:

Schooled
The Island Trilogy
The Dive Trilogy
The Everest Trilogy
Swindled
The Chicken Doesn't Skate
Something Fishy At Macdonald Hall
Macdonald Hall Goes To Hollywood
Nosepickers From Outerspace

I read some Gordon Korman, and they were pretty interesting, but not something I'd reread...for a while at least....

wisewoman, have you read Tahn yet? (I'm gonna keep asking you til you do! )

do ya'll know what's an awesome series? "The 39 Clues"! each book is written by a different author, but the plot and the charatcters are the same!

I'm reading Eragon right now. The English one and I have to say I like it now already even more than the Dutch one. Bad translation I think And this way I don't have to wait for the translation when book 4 releases

I love that series, it's awesome!! Don't you think that they got better as they went along? First one got my interest, Eldest was really cool, and then Brisingr blew me away!

*pokes head in sheepishly*

This last semester was overwhemingly crazy. I didn't read a whole lot, but some of the highlights were: [Beware, long literary ramblings likely to appear below; proceed at own risk]

~ Rereading P&P and S&S. Got so much more of the wit in P&P this time around.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. I enjoy the writing style of Hawthorne (the only other book of his I've read is The Scarlet Letter), but I have never been able to emotionally connect with his characters. I can always feel that I'm in the world he writes, yet I feel detached from the characters, I can't really pinpoint why though.

~ My younger sister got lent all four of the Regina Doman's Fairy Tale novels by a friend which meant I got to read them too.
1. I had read SW&RR earlier this year, but I went ahead and read Shadow of the Bear. I had a bit more squabbles with it this time. Perhaps the fact that I had recently reread a collection of fairy tales (including this book's inspiration) from my childhood contributed to the fact that Fish and Rose's aspect of the climax felt a tad contrived to me. Enjoyed it, but the magic of the first read wasn't there this time.
2. Black as Night. I was very upset with the particular edition I read as there were several glaring grammar errors that irritated me and made me want to give the book back to my sister with red ink marks.
3. Waking Rose was possibly my favorite, or second favorite, after SW&RR. I felt the plot was a bit far-fetched, but then again, trying to adapt a fairy tale to the modern world isn't a simple feat. A certain revelation of Fish's seemed a bit out of place and awkward to me, but it achieved it's plot point very well. This edition again had several errors which grated on my nerves. I do dearly love Fish and Rose though.
4. I'm not a fan of Midnight Dancers. The characters individually were well done, and even though there were certain of the twelve sisters Doman focused on more then others, I felt I could pick most of them apart pretty well. I was a bit surprised that there was so little tie to any characters from the previous three books, but it didn't detract; I think that if she had tried to tie it in anymore the characters would lose any possible realism they had left.
All in all, I enjoyed the series as quick reads and would recommend all but the last one as decent retellings with quotable moments. My biggest complaint would be that I found her action scenes to be poorly written; I felt that the confusion/tension of the scenes was always caught, yet after the story moved on, I was still trying to figure out what had just happened and how. But, I still enjoyed the series overall.

~ Read Mansfield Park. Enjoyed it, but it seemed to drag a bit at times. Not my favorite Austen.

. . .

I'm currently reading The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. First time. It's okay, but I feel like it's been a tad overrated, to my mind at least. I'm about half-ways through.

My Christmas loot was only Les Miserables. I also happened to give myself an almost-Christmas-gift of Mere Christianity, which I've read portions of, and The Screwtape Letters, which I've not read at all. My Lewis non-Narnia library was sorely lacking, and I hope to read more, but college is a bit of a deterrent at current.

. . .

Lastly, a look back at last year's lit goals and then this years:

[1]To read War and Peace over Christmas Break

[2]To read LotR this summer

[3]To actually keep track of what I read next year

[4]Get through several more classics

[5]Read P&P again

I completed 2 through 5, and I think that's pretty good. War and Peace is still on my list, as it has been for a decade or so. I read 29 books, counting rereads. Not a huge number, but I discovered/finally read Attolia, LotR, and McKillip. All of which now rest highly on my list of favorite books.

Goals for 2010:

1. Read Les Mis and JS&MN, both of which I own and are sitting on my shelves.

2. Purchase and devour read Conspiracy of Kings.

3. Reread the entire CoN again, as it's been over a year since my last full readthrough.

4. Look some more into several of my favorite authors, or authors who have peaked my interest this year (McKillip especially; recommendations welcomed — I've only read the Riddlemaster trilogy.)

5. Discover even more amazing books to earn the highly coveted ( ) spaces on the top of my favorite list.

6. Manage to post more frequently in this thread!

Welcome to the Attolian Conspiracy, stargazer . It's about time! I never, ever do this, but for the fourth Attolia book... well, I preordered it on Amazon .

True, it took a while...but it proved surprisingly difficult to find a copy - especially with all the bookstores around here! I preferred (and found) a used one, since my new-book budget has been trimmed.

Since I managed to avoid most of the spoilers in the past, the plot twist at the end caught me a bit unawares, though I suspected something was up. And in a bit of irony, perhaps

I suppose I could just get the next ones from the library.

In the meantime, prompted by recent discussions elsewhere, I've begun a reread of Jim Lovell's Lost Moon (later re-released as Apollo 13) - his account of the aborted 1970 moon landing.

I decided to do some more "light" reading over the past couple days, so I picked up one of the books in Lauraine Snelling's Dakotah Treasures series, this time around it was book 3, Opal. Aside from at the beginning and even somewhat through out to end there being the rather typical and slightly already been done heroine (pretty much the non-conformist type to the standards for women back in the 1880s American West, and I'm not that big of a fan of the non conformists in that age), and it being typed as a historical romance when the heroine herself was only fourteen for the entire novel (don't worry though, it all works out in the end...I guess), I liked it well enough. There was some great messages in it, and I could identify to a degree with some of the burdens that the main characters were carrying around. But... other then that it wasn't anything over remarkable I found. And I now shall return to reading War and Peace...

Oh, I've read most of those, I think. Well, four. I don't know how many there are now. Yeah, I was kind of squicked out with the protagonist being fourteen and her love interest being like thirty, but it was handled more or less well, I suppose. They're pretty well written in terms of characterization and stuff, but forgettable, more or less.

I've read one Red Rock Mystery, I think. I'm not sure if what I'm thinking of is the same thing you're talking about. A bunch of kids solving mysteries that are in some way involved with earth science and rocks? The one I read involved a kindly senior citizen almost being taken to a nursing home because the bad dude (who was pretending to be his son) wanted his land or something.

Before Christianity there had been no books.

I always knew I liked that faith.

Ha!! I love that. And LOL about you not deserving any books for Christmas! I'm so guilty of that too.

mara: I actually agree with the Sherlock Holmes journalist. I find most of Holmes' mysteries to be forgettable. I remember one that consisted of hunting a dead turkey all over London. Why do we care? Maybe there was something in the turkey... I can't remember.

Yeah, I guess he's right. SH is still awesome, though. Oh, I think it was a goose that had swallowed a valuable gem. lol

Hmm, perhaps I should state my reading goals for this year too:
-read the Harry Potter books this summer
-finally read JS&MN, which has been sitting on my shelf since last summer (probably will read during summer break as well)
-read A Conspiracy of Kings
-read all the books I've bought or been given (my mom gave me a book about missionaries on a flight or something and I still haven't got to it)
Er, that's all I can think of for right now.

This was my first week of Winter quarter. My English (well, literature, but all lit classes go under ENGL) classes are of Biblical Literature and Poetry. The first day of the Poetry class we looked at four poems (two by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one each by Emily Dickinson and Keats) that dealt with or were influenced by the story in Luke of Peter's betrayal of Jesus, when he said he didn't know Him and then Jesus looked at him. I liked them all, but for some reason Keats's is my favorite:

O grant that like to Peter I
May like to Peter B
And tell me lovely Jesus Y
Old Jonah went to C.

I like it.
In Biblical Lit so far we've read the apocryphal book of Susanna. It was good/interesting.

Book pun comic

Yes, Liberty, the Ranger's Apprentice novels are superb. I've only gotten the first two done, and I can't wait to get some more. I'd like to own them, though, so here is hoping I can either get some cash to go to B and N or Borders, or that they show up on BookMooch or PaperBackSwap.

Booky, you'll love Batman: Year One and Marvel: 1602. They are both awesome. And, of course, anything by Gaiman is usually good. I wish I could get some of the ones on that list. All I have is Batman: Year One out of those books. I am curious though, is that the same Peter David that has written a lot of Star Trek and other sci-fi novels? Shifter sounds interesting. Tell us what you think when you are done.

mar_girl, great job on reading that many books. I love that you are back to links. Where do you find this stuff? Although the link about Sherlock Holmes is just so very wrong. What is the author thinking?

SG, you will love the other Attolia books as well. Trust me, it will make sense as you get into the second book, onward.

WW, that cookbook looks promising. Though I am trying to figure out what the title means, it has sold me on it. Too bad I'm a horrific cook, so I'll never have need of it. Oh wow, now that I know that the fourth one is available for pre-order on Amazon, I'll have to check it out.

Kate, of course you deserve books. You can never have too many. Good ones at least. I have a policy that if I ever truly dislike a book, it is not going to remain in my custody much longer. Less than three stars, and it's gone. That college list is drool worthy itself, by the by.

I just reviewed Anne of Avonlea. Check it out, along with my other reviews at here.

http://www.librarything.com/profile_reviews.php?view=MereChristian

Well, that's it for now, all.

I bid you all adieu.